Virginia Woolf Quotes
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Have you any notion how many books are written about women in the course of one year? Have you any notion how many are written by men? Are you aware that you are, perhaps, the most discussed animal in the universe?
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Blame it or praise it, there is no denying the wild horse in us.
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The waves broke and spread their waters swiftly over the shore. One after another they massed themselves and fell; the spray tossed itself back with the energy of their fall. The waves were steeped deep-blue save for a pattern of diamond-pointed light on their backs which rippled as the backs of great horses ripple with muscles as they move. The waves fell; withdrew and fell again, like the thud of a great beast stamping.
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No sooner have you feasted on beauty with your eyes than your mind tells you that beauty is vain and beauty passes
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Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces.
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But our hatred is almost indistinguishable from our love.
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And now more than anything I want beautiful prose. I relish it more and more exquisitely.
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It would have been impossible, completely and entirely, for any woman to have written the plays of Shakespeare in the age of Shakespeare.
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It is no use trying to sum people up. One must follow hints, not exactly what is said, nor yet entirely what is done.
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Young women... you are, in my opinion, disgracefully ignorant. You have never made a discovery of any sort of importance. You have never shaken an empire or led an army into battle. The plays by Shakespeare are not by you, and you have never introduced a barbarous race to the blessings of civilization. What is your excuse?
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The truth is, I often like women. I like their unconventionality. I like their completeness. I like their anonymity.
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While fame impedes and constricts, obscurity wraps about a man like a mist; obscurity is dark, ample, and free; obscurity lets the mind take its way unimpeded. Over the obscure man is poured the merciful suffusion of darkness. None knows where he goes or comes. He may seek the truth and speak it; he alone is free; he alone is truthful, he alone is at peace.
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... it's been a perpetual discovery, my life. A miracle.
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Venerable are letters, infinitely brave, forlorn, and lost.
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I will go down with my colours flying.
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As I grow old I hate the writing of letters more and more, and like getting them better and better.
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For the film maker must come by his convention, as painters and writers and musicians have done before him.
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if newspapers were written by people whose sole object in writing was to tell the truth about politics and the truth about art we should not believe in war, and we should believe in art.
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But Sasha who after all had no English blood in her but was from Russia where the sunsets are longer, the dawns less sudden, and sentences often left unfinished from doubt as to how best to end them.
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What has praise and fame to do with poetry? Was not writing poetry a secret transaction, a voice answering a voice? So that all this chatter and praise, and blame and meeting people who admired one and meeting people who did not admire one was as ill suited as could be to the thing itself- a voice answering a voice.
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Against you I will fling myself, unvanquished and unyielding, O Death!
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A light here required a shadow there.
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Really I don't like human nature unless all candied over with art.
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I see nothing. We may sink and settle on the waves. The sea will drum in my ears. The white petals will be darkened with sea water. They will float for a moment and then sink. Rolling over the waves will shoulder me under. Everything falls in a tremendous shower, dissolving me.